


in spirit

by renecdote



Series: hc_bingo 2019 [8]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Cursed, Gen, General spooky vibe, Ghosts, Haunted House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21622981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: “Even the ghost wasn’t helpful,” Parker says, with the kind of put-out tone that most people don’t use when discussing ghosts.
Series: hc_bingo 2019 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1498529
Comments: 16
Kudos: 43





	in spirit

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on tumble (Eliot + home). Also fills the 'cursed' square on my hurt/comfort bingo card.

The floorboards creak with every step. Eliot keeps his eye out for places where the wood has rotted through, but as decrepit as the house looks, it still seems to be standing strong. 

He can hear Sophie in the kitchen. The clicking of her heels between each bang of a cupboard door, the quiet sneezes every time her snooping stirs up dust. 

Parker is upstairs. He can’t hear her.

Hardison is in Eliot’s ear, yammering about something that had started relevant and quickly digressed into nonsense. Haunted babies or hellhounds or something. There is a joke in there somewhere about which one of them would be the first to die in a horror movie. (Eliot thinks it would be Nate, Hardison would argue that the sexist history of horror films dictates it be Sophie. There is no question that Parker would outlive them all.) 

Nate, mastermind that he is, had taken one look at the rotting boards of the deck wrapping around the house, the broken windows and sunken roof, and decided to investigate the outside. Eliot catches a glimpse of him through a dirty window, standing in front of a rusted swing set at the far end of the backyard. He doesn’t have to think too hard to imagine what thoughts are going through Nate’s head. 

In the next room, the carpet is faded and mouldy. Maybe a dining room once, it looks the most damaged, with a hole in the ceiling where they was probably a light fixture in the past. When Eliot stops under it and looks up, he finds a grinning Parker looking down at him. She makes a face, then almost goes cross-eyed with an unexpected sneeze. The whole ceiling seems to shake with her.

“Be careful,” Eliot growls.

Parker rolls her eyes. She disappears from the hole and Eliot stays still, listening, waiting for the whole house to fall down around them, until Parker reappears around the doorway that he entered through.

“There’s nothing here,” she says, kicking at a broken chair leg. There’s no sign of where the rest of the chair disappeared to, only the splintered leg left to prove it had even been there in the first place.

The whole house is like that. Broken and left to rot, but with no signs what happened or why it was abandoned. Eliot had followed the carnage from the front door, mapping it the way he would recreate a fight from the bodies and bloodstains left behind. There are no bloodstains here though. No bodies either, despite the reports of suspicious deaths Hardison had dug out of the local newspaper archive. They were expecting to uncover a scandalous, blood-soaked secret, but so far all they’ve found is dust and broken furniture.

“Alright, kids,” Nate says in their ears. “Let’s pack it up, we aren’t going to find our leverage here.”

“Even the ghost wasn’t helpful,” Parker says, with the kind of put-out tone that most people don’t use when discussing ghosts. It seems about right that Parker would be as unbothered by the supernatural as she is by pretty much everything else though.

“The what?” Hardison squeaks. 

“She doesn’t like when people come here,” Parker tells them. “I managed to talk her out of cursing any of us though.”

Eliot looks back over his shoulder. If Parker’s ghost is there, he can’t see her. 

When they reach the van, Hardison hugs them, one arm around Eliot’s neck, the other around Parker’s. “That place was way too freaky,” he says, sounding more rattled than a man who spent the whole time in the van has any right to.

Eliot pushes him back. “Come on, man,” he grouses. “You weren’t even in there. An’ it wasn’t that freaky, you’ve just been watching too many movies.”

“Parker saw a ghost!”

Nate puts a halt to the bickering long enough to get them all back into the van and headed down the winding driveway. When they reach the road, Eliot glances back. For a moment, the house looks different. No broken windows, no sunken roof, not even a spot of peeling paint. It looks new again, squeaky clean with sky blue trim. Then Eliot blinks and it’s gone. He shakes his head. Weird. Must have been a trick of the light.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is [here](https://renecdote.tumblr.com/)


End file.
